Year: 2008

Or Else What

swanksalot0 comment
It’s the Future

It’s the Future

Received an amusing email, spam presumedly, from a Hong Kong company re my domain name. Here it is in its entirety:

We are Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. which is the domain name register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “b12partners” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Dec 25, 2008.Since after our investigation we found that this word has been in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark, so we inform you in no time. If you consider these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first, contact us soon. Thanks for your co-operation and support.

In order to avoid the law problems invovled,we need to confirm with you first.If you consider these domain names are not important,please don’t reply this email,we will cooperate with the third company Kind Regards, Andy.liu

Tel: +852-31757930(ext.8023)

Fax: +852-31757932

Email: Andy.liu@hknetwork.hk.cn

Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. Website: www.hknsc.hk

Yes, indeed, I’ll get right on that.

Especially since they are so serious about their claims

Bookmarks for December 19th through December 26th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links for December 19th through December 26th:

  • Bugs & Fixes: Delete files to prevent crashes in OS X 10.5.6 | Mac 911 | Macworld – “deletion of the “dynamic loader shared cache” in the /var/db/dyld directory. A corrupt cache here turns out to be one cause of a blue screen crash. “
  • The War on Christmas: The Early Years – “During the Reformation, some Puritans condemned Christmas celebration as “trappings of popery” and the “rags of the Beast.” The Roman Catholic Church responded by promoting the festival in a more religiously oriented form. Following the Parliamentarian victory over King Charles I during the English Civil War, England’s Puritan rulers banned Christmas, in 1647. Pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities, and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 ended the ban, but many clergymen still disapproved of Christmas celebration.”

  • Is Condo Board sabotaging Marina City Landmarking? – “As we’ve written before, one of the world’s finest buildings, Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City, is burdened with one of the worst condo boards, one that has repeatedly expressed contempt for the First Amendment, not to mention basic human intelligence, and deployed its lawyer, former progressive legislator Ellis Levin, to harass anyone who doesn’t buy into their delusions of grandeur.”
  • Bundled Up Beautifully | Mrs. O – “On December 5, the temperature in Chicago topped out at 18 degrees. So it is no wonder that this glimpse of Mrs. O that day revealed her sporting a casual but winter-ready look. The occasion was a lunch with two friends and she didn’t have far to go as she left the restaurant Blackbird in the West Loop (located around the corner from Maria Pinto’s boutique) and walked to the car driven by the Secret Service. ”

    Re: my photo of Ms. O at Blackbird that caused a minor kerfluffle

  • Matthew Yglesias » The New Moderate – “Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. “
  • BULLS: Sam Smith: Bulls fans want a trade for Christmas… but not yet – Smith must be talking about John McCain here, because even Smith doesn’t think he’s smarter than Obama:
    “Even for NBA GM’s. Look, most aren’t that much smarter than you. Did you watch the presidential debates? Tell me you didn’t sit there going, “Hey, I’m smarter than that guy!””
  • JonathanRosenbaum.com – THE STRANGER’S RETURN (1933) – Why isn’t this film on DVD? Criterion Collection?

    “What a pleasurable experience it is to pass directly from a slew of end-of-the-year screeners, most of which I can’t watch to the end, to a 1933 King Vidor opus that still isn’t commercially available on DVD”

  • In the meadow, we can pan a snowman – Roger Ebert’s Journal – Ah Mr. Ebert, you have a way with words. From a entire column built upon one-liners cribbed from previous columns:

    “I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny. — Response to Vincent Gallo’s hex to give me colon cancer”

  • Black and White Fine-Tuning in Photoshop CS3 | Layers Magazine – From the print version:
    “A black-and-white photograph is all about the subtle matrix of tonal values that give shape and form to the image. Knowing how to precisely apply modifications to light and shadow is key to fine-tuning a black-and-white photo. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at some ways to shape and enhance the tonality of a black-and-white image with some quick and simple techniques.”

End of Blogging

Seth Anderson0 comment

If GateHouse Media succeeds in their lawsuit, this blog, and many others will have to cease existence. What percentage of blog materials is quoted, fair-use information from other sites? Just using B12 as an example, I’d say over 75%.

GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit Monday against the New York Times Co. alleging copyright infringement after the NYT-owned Boston Globe frequently posted links containing headlines and the first sentences from articles on GateHouse’s community news sites.

-View the Document: The 25-page lawsuit [PDF]
-View the Document: Request for an injunction [PDF] to stop the Globe from posting GateHouse links.
-View the Document: 35-page support document for the injunction [PDF]
-View the Document: Affidavit by GateHouse Media Metro Editor-in-Chief Gregory Reibman [PDF]
–Your Town Newton, one of the Boston Globe’s community sites that sparked the lawsuit. See the news links in the center content gutter.

The lawsuit, if successful, could create a monumental chilling effect for bloggers, news sites, search engines, social media sites and aggregators such as Topix and Techmeme, which link to articles, display headlines and use snippets of copyrighted text from other sites. Initiatives such as the NYTimes.com Times Extra, which displays links to related articles from other sites, could be shut down for fear of copyright lawsuits. It could lead to a repudiation of one of the fundamental principles on which the Internet was built: the discovery and sharing of information.

In its complaint, GateHouse called the article links “deep links” because they do not link to the home page of the site. The “deep link” language in the complaint is meant to invoke cases such as the Supercrosslive.com case, wherein a motorcross news site was successfully prohibited from deep linking to a competing site’s streaming video file, which bypassed the site’s advertising.

…

GateHouse’s assertion is that the Boston Globe community site’s use of the headlines cannibalizes GateHouse’s content and causes it financial harm because readers gather news from the links and snippets on the Globe’s site rather than visit GateHouse’s sites. Although not explicitly stated in the complaint, this means GateHouse likely believes the loss of readers from possible increased use of the Globe’s site will not be offset by the readers brought in by its competitor’s links.

[From Journalistopia » GateHouse Lawsuit vs. New York Times Co. has Dire Implications | Danny Sanchez]

I had never heard of GateHouse Media before today1, but they put out a lot of publications, mostly weeklies it looks like.

No joke, if this lawsuit is successful, I will have to shut down this blog immediately, as will the majority of other news-related blogs. The risk of liability is just too great.

Footnotes:
  1. well except for being mentioned in the Tribune bankruptcy as a debt-ridden newspaper company [↩]

April Fools Comes Early

Seth Anderson0 comment

The New York Times pulls a Sarah Palin…

In Monday’s newspaper, we published a letter over the name of the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, criticizing Caroline Kennedy. This letter was a fraud and should not have been published. Mr. Delanoë’s office has since confirmed that he did not write it.

Printing the letter, which also appeared on nytimes.com until it was removed, violated the standards and procedures of The New York Times editorial department.

It is our practice to verify the authenticity of every letter we publish. Like most of our letters these days, this one arrived by e-mail. We sent an edited version back to the writer of the e-mail and did not receive a response.

At that point, the letter should have been set aside. It was not.

The Times has expressed its regret to Mr. Delanoë’s office for the lapse in judgment that led to this error. We now express those regrets to our readers.

We will be reviewing our procedures in an attempt to ensure that an error like this is not repeated.

[From Editors’ Note – Letter – NYTimes.com]

Ooopie!

The original letter read:

As mayor of Paris, I find Caroline Kennedy’s bid for the seat of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton both surprising and not very democratic, to say the least. What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat? We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling.

With all the respect and admiration I have for Ms. Kennedy’s late father, I find her bid in very poor taste, and, after reading “Kennedy, Touring Upstate, Gets Less and Less Low-Key” (news article, Dec. 18), in my opinion she has no qualification whatsoever to bid for Senator Clinton’s seat.

We French have been consistently admiring of the American Constitution, but it seems that recently both Republicans and Democrats are drifting away from a truly democratic model. The Kennedy era is long gone, and I guess that New York has plenty of more qualified candidates to fill the shoes of Hillary Clinton. Can we speak of American decline?

Bertrand Delanoë Paris, Dec.

18, 2008

Bush Aides Rush to Enact a Rule Obama Opposes

Seth Anderson0 comment

Is it January yet?1

I like to eat paste

The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job.

The rule, which has strong support from business groups, says that in assessing the risk from a particular substance, federal agencies should gather and analyze “industry-by-industry evidence” of employees’ exposure to it during their working lives. The proposal would, in many cases, add a step to the lengthy process of developing standards to protect workers’ health.

Public health officials and labor unions said the rule would delay needed protections for workers, resulting in additional deaths and illnesses.

With the economy tumbling and American troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush has promised to cooperate with Mr. Obama to make the transition “as smooth as possible.” But that has not stopped his administration from trying, in its final days, to cement in place a diverse array of new regulations.

[From Bush Aides Rush to Enact a Rule Obama Opposes – NYTimes.com]

Footnotes:
  1. oops, forgot to post this a while ago. Still true that President is rushing to strip away as many anti-pollution regulations as his administration can, as far as I know [↩]

EPA veils hazardous substances

Seth Anderson0 comment

Oh, just lovely. Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger write:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency routinely allows companies to keep new information about their chemicals secret, including compounds that have been shown to cause cancer and respiratory problems, the Journal Sentinel has found.

The newspaper examined more than 2,000 filings in the EPA’s registry of dangerous chemicals for the past three years. In more than half the cases, the EPA agreed to keep the chemical name a secret. In hundreds of other cases, it allowed the company filing the report to keep its name and address confidential.

This is despite a federal law calling for public notice of any new information through the EPA’s program monitoring chemicals that pose substantial risk. The whole idea of the program is to warn the public of newfound dangers.

The EPA’s rules are supposed to allow confidentiality only “under very limited circumstances.”

Legal experts and environmental advocates say the practice of “sanitizing,” or blacking out, this information not only strips vital information from the public, it violates the agency’s own law.

Section 14 of the Toxic Substances Control Act, the foundation for all the EPA’s toxic and chemical regulations, stipulates that chemical producers may not be granted confidentiality when it comes to health and safety data.

“The EPA has chosen to ignore that,” said Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin.

The newspaper’s findings are just the latest example of how EPA administrators more often than not put company interests above the needs of consumers.

[Click to continue reading EPA veils hazardous substances – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online]

not really news, just further confirmation that the EPA hates humanity.

Toujours Tingo

swanksalot2 Comments


“Toujours Tingo” (Adam Jacot de Boinod)

Oooh, sounds fun. Nothing like working in bizarre phrases into conversation

Toujours Tingo, a book by Adam Jacot de Boinod, lists weird words and bizarre phrases from around the world. The “tingo” of its title is an Easter Island word, meaning to borrow objects from a friend’s house one by one until there are none left.

some faves:

Layogenic: Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close.

Mouton enragé : French for someone calm who loses their temper – literally, “an enraged sheep”.

Fensterln: German for climbing through a window to avoid someone’s parents so you can have sex without them knowing.

Stroitel: Russian for a man who likes to have sex with two women at the same time.

Okuri-okami: Japanese for a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door – literally, a “see-you-home wolf

Les avoir a zero: French for “to have one’s testicles down to zero”, or be frightened.

Du kannst mir gern den buckel runterrutschen und mit der zunge bremsen: Austrian for “go to hell” – literally “You can slide down my hunchback using your tongue as a brake”.

[Continue reading Toujours Tingo: Weird words and bizarre phrases – Telegraph]

Perfect for the language maven on your Xmas list…

Bookmarks for December 18th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading December 18th from 12:22 to 19:25:

  • Butter Holds the Secret to Cookies That Sing – NYTimes.com – Huh. I don’t bake all that often, but good to keep in mind: “The most common mistakes made by home bakers, professionals say, have to do with the care and handling of one ingredient: butter. Creaming butter correctly, keeping butter doughs cold, and starting with fresh, good-tasting butter are vital details that professionals take for granted, and home bakers often miss. …For mixing and creaming, butter should be about 65 degrees: cold to the touch but warm enough to spread. Just three degrees warmer, at 68 degrees, it begins to melt.”
  • Bundle up out there – “Annual deaths from extreme cold: 680 Annual deaths from marijuana overdose: 0 Something must be done about this. My God, they let children play in it! And lots of people even own their own freezers. Somebody oughta write a law.”
  • 2008 in photographs (part 2 of 3) – The Big Picture – Boston.com – more awesome photojournalism of 2008

  • The year 2008 in photographs (part 1 of 3) – The Big Picture – Boston.com – takes a while to load, so be patient
  • Chicago Reader Blogs: Grand Theft Huffpo – “The Huffington Post’s local “aggregation” wing1 2 straight stole our entire Bon Iver Critic’s Choice–they didn’t ask permission (“read the whole article”? that is the whole article, dumbass). Here’s a screen shot (or click the thumbnail), since we’re obviously about to ask them to take it down.”

Bookmarks for December 17th through December 18th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links for December 17th through December 18th:

  • Greater Chicago Red Cross News: Hey Drivers, This is Only the First Snow. Get Ready. – Photo by swanskalot.
  • Goldman Sachs cuts taxes to one percent by moving profits offshore – Nicely done. “Say you got a ten billion dollar loan to shore up your finances, and you paid your employees $10.9 billion, and you raked in $2.3 billion for the year.

    What would you say you owed in taxes? One percent?

    That’s what you’d pay if you were Goldman Sachs, Inc. The high-flying brokerage — and former home of Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — has announced it’s paying just $14 million in taxes this year.

    Last year, their tax bill was $6 billion, or 34.1 percent. That represents a year-over-year drop of 33.1 percent.”

  • http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/12/apple_pulls_out_of_mac_expo_bi.html – Having never been to a Macworld Expo, since I don’t do well in crowds, I could really give a shit whether or not Apple Inc goes. Some do. John Welch isn’t one: “But really, why is this a surprise? Let me be perfectly clear here:

    Apple Inc. HATES unmanaged random customer contact.
    If anyone thinks the powers that be at Apple have ever liked the idea that just anyone could walk up to them for 4-5 days and ask inconvenient, (read: “any”) questions of their employees, y’all are smoking crack. Apple does not like that. At all. Without Macworld Conference & Expo, here are the all the avenues that average customers can directly contact Apple: The physical Apple Stores, the online Apple Store, a small handful of public email addresses which all involve the word “feedback”, mailing lists, and the AppleCare support line.”